[It's] not like you throw a stick out and you hit 50 giants. I mean there’s not that many giants in the world. So, basically when we started this, Bill Goldman said that Andre’s the only one who can play this part. He said you’ve got to get Andre the Giant.Sadly, I think it's now fifteen years (The American President) since Reiner directed a good film. Still, worthy interview.
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
ANYBODY WANT A PEANUT? HitFix's Drew McWeeny sits down with Rob Reiner for a career retrospective interview. Much talk of The Princess Bride and Stand By Me (and what it was like working with the original authors of both), of seeing and developing Aaron Sorkin's talents, the state of the film industry, and what it was like to cast Fezzik:
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1. Interesting trivia tidbit I picked up at the movies this weekend in a preshow--Liam Neeson read for/auditioned for the role of Fezzik.
ReplyDelete2. It's a pretty rapid descent after American President, but Ghosts of Mississippi is OK and has a really chilling performances from James Woods as Byron de la Beckwith (even though it gets very very preachy), and there are some interesting moments in Rumor Has It.... But man, his filmography from 1986-1992 is a damn fine and eclectic streak--Stand by Me, Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, Misery, and A Few Good Men.
Favorite thing: When asked about Aaron Sorkin, he says, "he's more fascicled with words than probably any writer working today." That he loaded that statement with a word that probably sent us all to Mirriam-Webster is fitting as all get-out. Love it!
ReplyDeleteNo questions about North?
ReplyDeleteThe spelling in this article makes me weep.
ReplyDeleteThose aren't mistakes that someone as well versed in movies as McWeeny is should make. It's likely he gave the tape of the interview to someone who knows nothing about film history to transcribe it, or used a speech recognition program - the phonetic spellings ("Bunwell," "and Tonioni") are a tipoff.
ReplyDeleteIndigo Montoya? *weeps*
ReplyDeleteBut it was a great interview once I blinked past the typos.
How many directors who had their first big hit/critical success after 1980 have directed more than 5 great films over more than a 10 year span?
ReplyDeleteIn other words, when you look at filmmakers who hit the scene in the 80s and seemed destined for sustained greatness like Terry Gilliam, David Lynch, Spike Lee, Ivan Reitman, Jim Jarmusch and others, Rob Reiner's not unusual in not having a very long shelf life for making relevant pictures.
I think in that larger discussion (not just focusing on the merits of Reiner's more recent films but as to all of those directors that XWL mentions), it comes back to the point that Reiner and McWeeny hammer on in the interview -- can "relevant pictures" even get the green light in Hollywood anymore? I'd argue that Spike's "When the Levees Broke" was extremely relevant -- but he had to release that through HBO, and not in theaters.
ReplyDeleteCoen Brothers, Spike Lee, Christopher Nolan, Peter Jackson, James Cameron, Steven Soderberg, Robert Zemeckis ...
ReplyDeleteNot sure I'd go along with Zemeckis there, but I'll toss out Taraninto as a name.
ReplyDeleteFrom 84-94: Romancing the Stone, BttF 1 and 2, Roger Rabbit ... can't say Gump or BttF 3. And Contact/Cast Away stray too far from the decade part.
ReplyDeleteAlso John Sayles and Tim Burton (although for Burton, YMMV). I think Jonathan Demme and Ron Howard fit as well, because their early work in the mid-1970s for the Corman studio directing exploitation classics like Caged Heat, Crazy Mama, and Grand Theft Auto doesn't rise to the level of first big hit or critical success.
ReplyDeleteI took the framing to be 5 or more great films over a period of a decade or more -- the point, I thought, was about directors who delivered on the early promise of sustained greatness by actually making >5 great films over the long haul.
ReplyDeleteZemeckis, like Reiner, has had a huge drop in quality in recent years, though with Zemeckis, it's tied to his obsession with the mo-cap stuff.
ReplyDeleteLooks like the article has been proofread now.
ReplyDeleteI can understand where you're coming from with that list of directors, but let's have a closer look:
ReplyDeleteCoen Brothers, from 1984-1998 Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Miller's Crossing, Barton Fink, The Hudsucker Proxy, Fargo, The Big Lebowski. Easy to say there are more 'hits' (artistically speaking, anyway) than misses. From 2000 on, O Brother Where Art Thou?, The Man Who Wasn't There, Intolerable Cruelty, The Ladykillers, No Country For Old Men, Burn After Reading, A Serious Man. In my opinion, more misses than hits on that list, plus, the misses are more off the mark, and the hits are less on the mark, so while the quality is still there, I don't think it's the same high level they were at earlier in their careers.
Spike Lee, in the 12 years from She's Gotta Have It, to He Got Game, made some seriously good movies (along with a few that might be Mo Better forgotten...), but in the time since then, his appeal has become narrower, and more often than not he's directing scripts he didn't write, so while he's working, he's not been the same kind of presence in the film world he was in his first dozen years.
Christopher Nolan directed Memento in 2000, and including that, has made six pictures (all of which have been relatively to phenomenally successful commercially or artistically), but let's see where he's at in 2020, it's too early to tell if he fits or breaks that pattern.
Other than Heavenly Creatures or the LOTR trilogy, I wouldn't call Peter Jackson's output either great, or successful, and I don't know that he can be expected to ever do anything on the scale of LOTR again in his career (nor would he be sane to even attempt such a thing).
James Cameron is a special case, I think, given that his output is so sporadic, and despite the massive commercial success for his last two films (Titanic, Avatar), I'm not sure that either of those flicks will hold up over time.
Soderbergh's output of late (since Traffic) doesn't seem equal to his output before that picture, but differing opinions on that point are understandable.
Zemeckis, ummm, not personally a fan of his work, other than the first Back to the Future or Roger Rabbit, for me personally his films are marked by a cold technical brilliance wedded to insipidly juvenille story-telling (and not in the good way).
Personally, I think there are more than one trend at work here. I think part of it is a generational thing, in that the kind of stories a director is attracted to telling in their 30s and 40s are better than what projects they decide to do when they're more self satisfied and have a body of work behind them in their 50s. Part of it is that most artists in most fields (certainly in music and painting) catch something at a particular time in their life that perfectly fits a particular time and place, and once the times change, it's hard for that artist to change with it. And with film in particular, the business has changed, and the better venue for 'adult' stories with depth and layers has moved to television, and the smarter writer/directors have moved on from the big screen and embraced the current paradigm.